Gareth Jones

Company: Amayeta
Product: SWF Encrypt 6.0
Price: £75 / $145

I’ve used Amayeta’s SWF Encrypt for a couple of years now I guess, since version 5.

Coincidentally, Amayeta is owned by the same guy who owns MDM (Jaspal Sohal) – the guys behind Zinc. There have been a fair few posts on this blog about Zinc, its poor quality and its ridiculous bug count, so why would I be using SWF Encrypt to obfuscate my Flash files? Well, it does what it’s supposed to do and does so without much fuss. Granted, that it does so without requiring multiple support requests like Zinc is probably more down to the fact that it’s such a simple application than anything else, but as an end-user I don’t care about that – I just want an application that works.

Are there any problems with SWF Encrypt? Yes, there are a few, but as I said the application is so simple there aren’t many ways in which it can go wrong. All it needs to do is open a SWF, obfuscate it and output the result as a new file.

So, with such a simple list of requirements, what’s wrong? Well, if you select a SWF that you already have open within the Flash IDE and try to obfuscate it, the application actually crashes. There’s no elegant message informing you that you need to close the target SWF first – the application simply quits without warning. I suppose it wouldn’t be a Jaspal Sohal application if it didn’t unexpectedly crash somewhere along the line, but even for one of his products this is surprising. I mean, surely an application that is designed to open one file and save another should be able to cope with files that are locked, have read-only permissions or different user permissions etc? Apparently not. Having said that, it hasn’t crashed while working on any files that aren’t already open elsewhere so I suppose I should count myself lucky here.

The other two issues are less significant but still a little irritating. When you obfuscate a SWF, the application creates a new SWF with a new name, such as “example_secure.swf”. This is fine in theory, but in practice after buying such an application you’ll want to go through your back-catalogue of work and apply some protection to all your previous files – ideally done so that you can just upload the new files to your web server without any fuss. Having a file with a new name like this means you either need to rename the file (making sure to either manually rename or delete the original first) or update all of your file name references everywhere else. This gets to be a pain in the arse when you have a large number of SWFs to do. There’s also no recursive feature so you’ll have to navigate into each and every folder manually to select each file individually – again, this can be a pain in the arse on larger projects.

The last irritation is that the application doesn’t seem to remember UNC directories and reverts to a default directory every time you open it, forcing you to navigate back down a long UNC tree structure every time you want to republish that one SWF that you keep having to update on client requests. There is a “favourite folder” option available, but using this just brings up the SWFs available in that particular folder and doesn’t update the navigation tree, so if you want to go into a folder that’s one up or one down from there (such as in a medium/large-sized project) it’s of no help.

SWF Encrypt offers no flexibility in terms of the obfuscation it applies. Perhaps this isn’t really a requirement if the obfuscation technique is solid enough, but as different techniques can have different effects on the file-size of the output, it would be nice to be able to tweak these settings on projects where minimal file sizes are important.

Technically SWF Encrypt does what it claims to do – it obfuscates SWF files – but when there are alternatives available that also do this and actually put some effort into being more usable, this isn’t really enough – especially when SWF Encrypt retails for considerably more than its competitors. SWF Encrypt costs £75 for a single license, whereas some of its competitors cost less than half of that and offer the same – if not more – features.

Update: Since writing this review I’ve been presented with alternative products from different vendors, and as a result I feel that I need to adjust SWF Encrypt’s score to better reflect the difference between it and its competitors.

4/10

Coming soon: A review of how these SWF protectors stack up against SWF decryption tools.

• Current project: Writing lots and lots of documentation and playing Just Cause 2 at down-time.